Colin and Jules have recently published a chapter, with Thomas Huber (ANU), about using non-canonical amino acids for the modulation of enzyme activity. This chapter, published in Modern Biocatalysis: Advances Towards Synthetic Biological Systems (RSC Publishing), outlines the use of unnatural amino acids (UAAs) in protein engineering. Examples of how UAAs have successfully been used to engineer proteins for enhanced thermostability, catalytic efficiency, specificity and selectivity are provided, and remaining challenges within the field are discussed. This work also describes the engineering of tRNA synthetases for the site-specific incorporation of UAAs into proteins.
The chapter can be found here.
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